Sometimes the hardest things in life are what make you the strongest. - Ziad Abdelnour

Too often entrepreneurs are reactive to the challenges inherent when building a company... the most successful founders are proactive.

Great wealth is often created by the launching of great surprises, not by the launching of great enterprises.

I remain fundamentally optimistic about
Wall Street as a marketplace and as a vehicle for wealth creation. Its
future will rightly depend on several variables, chief among them
being human choices; whether they be rationally, emotionally, subjectively
or objectively made. Financial engineering taught us that if
it could be quantified, it could be qualified. We learned about how
to use leverage and have abused that knowledge for a myriad of
reasons. We became practitioners of the transaction-based model, but forgot that long before the abacus there was trust and integrity,
anchors of relationship-based models common with Middle East and
Asian markets. It goes back to a handshake, the first and enduring
example of mutual consensus.